The Childhood of Theatre: The Errant Method for an ‘Infant Public’

Abstract

Chiara Guidi, along with Romeo and Claudia Castellucci, was one of the founders in 1981 of Societas Raffaello Sanzio (now renamed Societas), the Italian company that, above any other, has been at the forefront of the international theatre scene since the early 1980s. She was the soul of dramatic rhythm and vocal composition for the company’s productions, directing numerous plays and researching each actor’s spoken part. Author and producer of sound theatre since the 1990s, she has also created an intense artistic experience with children as part of her research and analysis of the relationship between voice and childhood, which has earned her several awards, including an Ubu Prize in 2013. In this interview¹ she discusses the early projects of Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which explored immersive, environmental performances for and with children – a line of research within the company’s multidirectional and overlapping experimental activity that she led. Dominika Laster is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Grotowski’s Bridge Made of Memory: Embodied Memory, Witnessing and Transmission in the Grotowski Work (2016), and is Executive Co-Director of the ‘Performance in the Peripheries’ initiative (see https://www.performanceperipheries.com).